‘Eileen,’ by Ottessa Moshfegh

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By Lily King

Aug. 14, 2015

“I looked like a girl you’d expect to see on a city bus,” begins “Eileen,” Ottessa Moshfegh’s seductive novel, “reading some clothbound book from the library about plants or geography, perhaps wearing a net over my light brown hair.” This is the eponymous Eileen, and we quickly learn that any assumptions we might make about her from her appearance would be dead wrong. “I didn’t really read books about flowers or home economics,” she tells us a few pages later. “I liked books about awful things — murder, illness, death.”

But murder, illness and death are so generic — and Eileen is anything but generic. Eileen is as vivid and human as they come. And because Eileen’s favorite topic is Eileen, she does not skimp on the details. She keeps a dead field mouse in the glove box of her Dodge Coronet. She wears lipstick to hide the natural shade of her lips, which are the color of her nipples. She has fantasies about the icicles that hang over her front door “cracking and darting through my breasts, splicing through the thick gristle of my shoulder like bullets or cleaving my brain into pieces.” She went to college for a year and a half, was called home to take care of her dying mother, took a job as a secretary at a correctional facility for boys, and now, at the age of 24, continues to live at home with her housebound father, an abusive, paranoid ex-cop: “He was fearful and crazy the way old drunks get.”

But Eileen does not keep house for her father. She refuses to clean, make meals or wash clothes. She simply brings bottle after bottle of gin to keep him in the stupor he prefers. “Here was the crux of my dilemma,” she tells us. “I felt like killing my father, but I didn’t want him to die.” Eileen dreams of leaving this coastal Massachusetts town — X-ville, she calls it — for a new life in New York, but her sense of duty, however minimal, keeps her stuck there. By the end of the glorious first chapter, however, the reader is assured that this is not a book about being stuck. It is a book about getting free. “In a week, I would run away from home and never go back. This is the story of how I disappeared.”

Eileen’s desire for freedom is not purely geographical. It is 1964, and a woman’s options are limited. She ought to have found a husband by now. She tells us in many different ways how unattractive, how invisible she was back then (the novel is told by an older, far more experienced Eileen, now in her 70s), but we get the sense that her lack of allure was subconsciously intentional — the last thing Eileen wants is ­another man to take care of. Besides, she has a lot of mixed feelings about sex.

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Ottessa MoshfeghCreditKrystal Griffiths

Through Eileen, Moshfegh is exploring a woman’s relationship to her body: the disconnection, the cultural claims, the male prerogative. “And at the time, I didn’t believe my body was really mine to navigate. I figured that was what men were for.” As a result, physical urges, particularly desire, repulse Eileen. “Sexual excitement nearly always made me feel sick.” Yet she has sexual desire, a lot of it; she just can’t see a path toward satisfying it. She doesn’t want to be thought of as a whore, like her sister, Joanie, who ran off with her boyfriend at age 17. “I’d always believed that my first time would be by force,” Eileen says. “Of course I hoped to be raped by only the most soulful, gentle, ­handsome of men, somebody who was secretly in love with me.” She denies herself all of her appetites. She rarely eats, and she spits out what she does, or expels it with laxatives. Her one pleasure, as post-coital as it gets for Eileen, happens in the basement after a particularly extensive use of the toilet: “Empty and spent and light as air, I lay at rest, silent, flying in circles, my heart dancing, my mind blank.”

Moshfegh, whose novella, “McGlue,” was published last year, writes beautiful sentences. One after the other they unwind — playful, shocking, wise, morbid, witty, searingly sharp. The ­beginning of this novel is so impressive, so controlled yet whimsical, fresh and thrilling, you feel she can do anything. You wouldn’t care if nothing much ever happened, if it all weren’t leading up to a crime. But it is. And Eileen’s life will be set on an entirely new course because of it. There is that wonderful tension between wanting to slow down and bathe in the language and imagery, and the impulse to race to see what happens, how it happens. Moshfegh feeds this with steady hints about what is to come. She calls Eileen’s story a “saga” and invokes the words “disappear” and “gone” at steady intervals.

Literary thrillers are like that charismatic politician who can reel everyone in, creating the illusion that no one will have to give up any of his values to be satisfied. But for this reader, the thrill is the language. It is sentences like this: “The terrain of my face was heavy with soft, rumbling acne scars blurring whatever delight or madness lay beneath that cold and deadly New England exterior.” And this, about an older co-worker: “The only sign of life she ever gave was when she lifted a finger to her mouth and a centimeter of pale lavender tongue came out to wet its tip.” And complicated moments, too (remember, Joanie is her sister): “Driving home along the moonlit streets, he laid his head on my shoulder, told me I was a good girl, that he loved me, that he was sorry he couldn’t be better, that he knew I deserved a real father. It moved me at first, but then his hand went to my breast. I beat him off easily. ‘Quit fussing, Joanie,’ he said, slumping back in his seat. I never mentioned it to anyone.”

The phrase “Until Rebecca showed up a few days later” becomes a taunting refrain, and when the mysterious Rebecca finally enters the story, we know she is the catalyst, the person who will set it all in motion. Unfortunately, Rebecca comes to us straight from the thriller camp. She is a “tall redheaded woman” who looks like “a singer or an actress,” and Eileen has “never come face-to-face with someone so beautiful in my life.” She has a “slim figure” and smokes “as though she owned the place.” Eileen is instantly smitten. Their meeting “marked the beginning of the dark bond which now paves the way for the rest of my story.”

But Eileen already has a dark bond. It is with her father. And it is truly, deeply dark — and raw, and real. Rebecca and her motivations, once we learn them, feel pasted in from another book. They do not square with the universe Moshfegh so meticulously created in the first part of the novel. We want Rebecca to be as twisted and interesting as Eileen, as tortured and menacing as her father. For a while we hang on to the hope that more will be revealed about her, that Rebecca’s motivations are as complicated, layered and rooted in the past as ­Eileen’s, that somehow the gun-blood-death culmination will feel as fresh and particular as the first part of the novel. And then we have to let those hopes go.

The real excitement toward the end is watching Eileen come into a position of authority for the first time in her life. With a gun in her hand and someone weaker and more compromised than herself to address, she steps into power. It is a rush and relief to hear Eileen’s voice, to see her find something in herself, a strength, a self, that she does not want to lose. Later, when Eileen is thinking back on Rebecca, she even reclaims her own novel. “I could say more about her, but this is my story after all, not hers.” We never doubted it, but it’s thrilling to hear her say it.